This year’s edition of the Festival Neue Literatur, which features new writing from Austria, Germany, Switzerland, and the U.S., will take place this upcoming weekend (February 19-22) and is loaded with interesting events.

Here’s a video overview of the festival itself:

You can find the complete schedule here, but I especially want to call your attention to this particular event:

“For the Love of Translation”
(Saturday, February 21, 12:30-2:30 at the Bowery Poetry Club)

Featured editors and translators will pair off and discuss a memorable literary translation. Their discussion will not only recount the critical decisions of their editing coordination, but will demystify their collaboration process.

I’m really excited to be able to participate in this year’s festival and have the chance to talk with Lisa about her work on our amazing anthology. And it’s an honor to share the stage with such an amazing group of editors, publishers, and translators!

All the events in the festival sound great, but one other one that I want to call some attention to is also taking place on Saturday:

Is money making the world go round or under? What are the effects of today’s ever more impenetrable financial system on social mobility and the life of the imagination? What, exactly, is trickling down?

For all of you lucky people living in the great city of New York, here are two fantastic upcoming events that you should try and attend.

First off, next Thursday, February 21st at 7pm at McNally Jackson, Stephen Snyder and Allison Markin Powell (both of whom make me swoon) will be talking about Japanese literature in translation as part of the always excellent Bridge Series.

Here’s a bit about both Stephen and Allison:

Stephen Snyder is Kawashima Professor of Japanese Studies at Middlebury College in Vermont. His most recent translation is Yoko Ogawa’s Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales (Picador, January 2013). He has translated works by Ogawa, Kenzaburo Oe, Ryu Murakami, and Miri Yu, among others. His translation of Kunio Tsuji’s Azuchi Okanki (The Signore) won the 1990 Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission translation prize. His translation of Natsuo Kirino’s Out was a finalist for the Edgar Award for best mystery novel in 2004. His translation of Yoko Ogawa’s Hotel Iris was short-listed for the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2011. He is the author of Fictions of Desire: Narrative Form in the Novels of Nagai Kafu and co-editor of Oe and Beyond: Fiction in Contemporary Japan, and he is currently working on a study of publishing practices in Japan and the United States and their effects on the globalization of Japanese literature.

Allison Markin Powell is a literary translator and editor. She has translated works by Motoyuki Shibata, Osamu Dazai (Schoolgirl, published by One Peace Books in 2011), and Hiromi Kawakami, among others, and was the guest editor for Words Without Borders’ first Japan issue. Her translation of Kawakami’s novel The Briefcase (Counterpoint, 2012) has been shortlisted for the 2012 Man Asian Prize.

I’ll bet this will be fantastic . . . really bummed that I’m only staying in NY through Wednesday night. And we’ll have a review of The Briefcase soon. I quite liked Hiromi Kawakami’s earlier novel, Manazuru, so I’m psyched to check this out. And Ogawa’s Revenge is top of my to read pile thanks to Will’s review.

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Also next weekend, the Fourth Annual Festival Neue Literature celebrating German-language literature will be taking place across Manhattan and Brooklyn. This year’s festival is curated by Susan Bernofsky and will feature Clemens Setz (Austria), Cornelia Travnicek (Austria), Leif Randt (Germany), Silke Scheuermann (Germany), Ulrike Ulrich (Switzerland), and Tim Krohn (Switzerland), as well as U.S. authors Joshua Ferris and Justin Taylor.

There are two “signature discussion panels” taking place this year: “Closed Circuits: Shrunken Dystopias” and “Breaking Away: Contemporary Travelogues.” Here’s all the info about both of those:

Dystopias used to be grand affairs, encompassing entire planets, but now you can find one contained in a suburban block on the outskirts of Frankfurt, an uncannily odd resort town in a mysterious locale, or a home for children suffering the world’s strangest disorder. Dysfunction is the new dystopia, and these subtly wry to bitingly ironic commentaries uniquely encapsulate the post-modern condition.

Here today, there tomorrow. Old-style travel stories seemed always to be about characters in search of themselves as inscribed in foreign landscapes. But what if the point of the travel is more escapist than exploratory? In these novels of discovery-avoidance – an avoidance not always successful – the journey is both more and less than a destination.

The lovely and energetic Riky Stock just sent me a ton of information about this year’s Festival Neue Literatur, which will take place in NYC from February 10th-12th and is curated by the also lovely and energetic Susan Bernofsky.

Here’s all the info you need:

The Festival of New Literature (February 10-12, 2012) will take place for the third time at various locations throughout New York City. This year’s festival will feature American authors Chris Adrian and Francisco Goldman, alongside six featured German-language authors. Susan Bernofsky, curator of the 2012 Festival of New Literature, is delighted to have Adrian and Goldman take part: “We were very fortunate to be able to secure these two wonderful writers for our festival. They will enrich our panels by their participation, and I am very much looking forward to hearing them in conversation with our German writers, Larissa Boehning and Inka Parei, our Austrian authors Linda Stift and Erwin Uhrmann and with Monica Cantieni and Catalin Dorian Florescu from Switzerland.” In addition, celebrated author Daniel Kehlmann and literary critic Liesl Schillinger will moderate the panel discussions hosted at powerHouse SoHo, Brooklyn, and at McNally Jackson Books, SoHo, respectively.

Festival Neue Literatur is a joint project of the Austrian Cultural Forum, the Consulate General of Switzerland in New York, Deutsches Haus at NYU, Deutsches Haus at Columbia University, the German Book Office NY, the German Consulate General in New York, the Goethe-Institut New York and Pro Helvetia.
All of the following events will be in English and are free and open to the public:

How German Is It? Literary Voices from Germany, Austria and Switzerland. A Workshop in Collaboration with Columbia Students

Six young novelists from Germany, Austria and Switzerland will present their latest work in a discussion with Columbia graduate students from the Department of Germanic Languages and the Writing Program.

Literature is often a delving into the past, made all but involuntary because the past has returned to haunt the present. Whether the history in question is familial, political or ancient, traces of old trauma can cast the present in a new light. This panel explores the different ways in which the past can be put to work in the name of storytelling.

As in the United States, the literary scene in Europe is currently abuzz with hybridity and border crossings that explore the lives of characters who move between different cultural and ethnic worlds. There as here questions of power and authenticity are not far behind as these authors explore the sometimes explosive conditions that arise when cultures intersect and, yes, sometimes clash.

All the events are free, and all sound really interesting, so if you’re going to be in the area, you should definitely check these all out.

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The History of Silence by Pedro Zarraluki
Reviewed by P. T. Smith

Pedro Zarraluki’s The History of Silence (trans. Nick Caistor and Lorenza García) begins with the narrator and his wife, Irene, setting out to write a book about silence, itself called The History of Silence: “This is the story of how. . .

There are plenty of reasons you can fail to find the rhythm of a book. Sometimes it’s a matter of discarding initial assumptions or impressions, sometimes of resetting oneself. Zigmunds Skujiņš’s Flesh-Coloured Dominoes was a defining experience in the necessity. . .

In a culture that privileges prose, reviewing poetry is fairly pointless. And I’ve long since stopped caring about what the world reads and dropped the crusade to get Americans to read more poems. Part of the fault, as I’ve suggested. . .

I would like to pose the argument that it is rare for one to ever come across a truly passive protagonist in a novel. The protagonist (perhaps) of Three Light-Years, Claudio Viberti, is just that—a shy internist who lives in. . .

The last five days of the eleventh-century Icelandic politician, writer of sagas, and famous murder victim Snorri Sturleleson (the Norwegian spelling, Snorre, is preserved in the book) make up Thorvald Steen’s most recently translated historical fiction, The Little Horse. Murdered. . .

We all know Paris, or at least we think we know it. The Eiffel Tower. The Latin Quarter. The Champs-Élysées. The touristy stuff. In Dominique Fabre’s novel, Guys Like Me, we’re shown a different side of Paris: a gray, decaying. . .

Birth of a Bridge by Maylis de Kerangal
Reviewed by Christopher Iacono

One hundred pages into Birth of a Bridge, the prize-winning novel from French writer Maylis de Kerangal, the narrator describes how starting in November, birds come to nest in the wetlands of the fictional city of Coca, California, for three. . .